Posted on 01/07/2002 8:19:37 AM PST by dead
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As scientist extraordinaire and author of an empire of science-fiction books, Arthur C. Clarke is one of the farthest-seeing visionaries of our time. His pithy quotations tug harder than those of most futurists on our collective psyches for their insights into humanity and our unique place in the cosmos. And none do so more than his famous Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
This observation stimulated me to think about the impact the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) would have on science and religion. To that end, I would like to immodestly propose Shermer's Last Law (I don't believe in naming laws after oneself, so as the good book says, the last shall be first and the first shall be last): "Any sufficiently advanced ETI is indistinguishable from God."
God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Because we are far from possessing these traits, how can we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely from an ETI who merely has them copiously relative to us? We can't. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than we are, then by definition the deity would be an ETI!
Consider that biological evolution operates at a snail's pace compared with technological evolution (the former is Darwinian and requires generations of differential reproductive success; the latter is Lamarckian and can be accomplished within a single generation). Then, too, the cosmos is very big and very empty. Voyager 1, our most distant spacecraft, hurtling along at more than 38,000 miles per hour, will not reach the distance of even our sun's nearest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system (which it is not headed toward), for more than 75,000 years.
Ergo, the probability that an ETI only slightly more advanced than we are will make contact is virtually nil. If we ever do find an ETI, it will be as though a million-year-old Homo erectus were dropped into the 21st century, given a computer and cell phone and instructed to communicate with us. The ETI would be to us as we would be to this early hominid--godlike.
Because of science and technology, our world has changed more in the past century than in the previous 100 centuries. It took 10,000 years to get from the dawn of civilization to the airplane but just 66 years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing.
Moore's Law of computer power doubling every 18 months or so is now approaching a year. Ray Kurzweil, in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, calculates that there have been 32 doublings since World War II and that the singularity point--the point at which total computational power will rise to levels so far beyond anything that we can imagine that it will appear nearly infinite and thus be indistinguishable from omniscience--may be upon us as early as 2050.
When that happens, the decade that follows will put the 100,000 years before it to shame. Extrapolate out about a million years (just a blink on an evolutionary timescale and therefore a realistic estimate of how far advanced ETIs will be), and we get a gut-wrenching, mind-warping feel for how godlike these creatures would seem. In Clarke's 1953 novel, called Childhood's End, humanity reaches something like a singularity and must then make the transition to a higher state of consciousness. One character early in the story opines that "science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now."
Although science has not even remotely destroyed religion, Shermer's Last Law predicts that the relation between the two will be profoundly affected by contact with an ETI. To find out how, we must follow Clarke's Second Law: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." Ad astra!
Michael Shermer is founding publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and author of The Borderlands of Science.
The logic of this statement is completely at odds with itself.
Just as any language is an invention. Even the lowest of the species have language. Are they capable of invention?
The natural principles described by mathematics are pre-existing. So how come we first "invent" an area of mathematics and only subsequently "discover" that it describers Nature?
I can't recall who once said: "God is a mathematician."
Some mathematician, no doubt.
Just for fun, on what document, quote, theory do you rest the idea that God is perfect?
And if God is/was perfect, why would there be the need for anything else? (What motivated God? A lacking? A desire?) It would seem reasonable to assume that ALL (God) was not perfect until he "let there be light" etc.
In which case, I've got some funny hunches about the perfection (God) the universe(s) are completing....
Basically, God is (re)creating himself through reality, like a smoke-ring twisting around itself as it moves into the future.
Maybe "reality" is the only way God can "travel".
Just for fun, on what document, quote, theory do you rest the idea that God is perfect?
And if God is/was perfect, why would there be the need for anything else? (What motivated God? A lacking? A desire?) It would seem reasonable to assume that ALL (God) was not perfect until he "let there be light" etc.
In which case, I've got some funny hunches about the perfection (God) the universe(s) are completing....
Basically, God is (re)creating himself through reality, like a smoke-ring twisting around itself as it moves into the future.
Maybe "reality" is the only way God can "travel".
Hey now! I resemble that remark. LOL
I suspect, though, that the type of ETI that the author meant was not a cute one like ET, but an awe-inspiring one like .... < searches for analogy from SF > .... Apollo in the Star Trek episode, "Who Mourns for Adonis?" Not God, but impressive enough to be a god to people significantly less advanced.
Would any sufficiently advanced ETSCI be indistingushable from God?
The more I think about it, the funnier it gets.
I'm no Biblical scholar (and am not now nor have ever been associated w/ a conspiracy--ignorant or otherwise) but I think Holy Scripture presents God as a perfect being.
Just for fun let's look at Milton's answer to your question, ie, why bother w/ creation if He were indeed complete.
In Paradise Lost JM posits that w/ the fall of Satan, God created man to redeem perfection. When man was tricked by Satan, Jesus Christ was sent to earth to redeem man (sorry, a bad synopsis). In the fullness of time JC will return and Paradise (along w/ us) will be regained.
IOW Creation is the process God works through to maintain perfection. Not entirely different from your smoke rings but w/ a point. Obviously the point is probably far from the mark, but I think worthy of consideration. (Milton's point-not mine).
Udderly ridiculous.
I think it was Eddington, as others have probably already answered. I think Earnst Mach was closer to the truth in saying that God would have no need of mathematics. Just as we have no need of mathematics to add one and one, as we can directly visualize the answer.
Numbers are a language: "The set of all sets that are simular to themselves" (I think thats correct)
So 'math' is an invention (language) that allows us to explore/discover 'logic' which is (we hope) an underlying 'law' of reality.
Then along comes quantum physics =)
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